How long before I can make a thread?
 

I just joined and tried to create a thread. It gave me an error, and I re-posted thinking it was a system error. This time I read the message about having to wait for moderation. How long does this process take, and do I have to wait to be manually upgraded before I can make threads without moderation?

You should be able to post a message immediately.

I thought there was some discussion recently, in order to prevent spamming, of having moderators review posts of new users before they hit some forums. Did that not come about?

Your post was moderated as SPAM accidentally.

Joshua, while I understand the need to filter spam bots (I run a vbulletin forum with 500k+ posts), I think the current process is a little too unfriendly. In my case, just implementing a simple question such as what you have (Name a type of airline rewards - i.e. miles) caught 99% of the bots. The odd spam post that gets through nowadays, my mods can take care of within 10-15 minutes.

Just now I responded to a thread and it didn't pop up any message about waiting for moderation or give any sort of error. It just brought me back to the thread without showing that I had tried to post. I'm hoping that this means my post is in a moderation queue.

Hope the criticism is constructive.

That does mean that your post was/is in moderation queue. You should not have to worry about being moderated at this point. Thank you,